>> i'm here to introduce someone who many of you will know, certainly if you've been reading "the new york times"' coverage of pakistan and afghanistan, the byline c.j. chivers will be well known to you. in fact, chris chivers was part of a team of new york times staff that was awarded the 2009 pulitzer prize for international reporting. his new book, "the gun," is is a history of the ak-47 and the, that weapon's significance in world affairs. he comes to this book not just based on his experience as a reporter, but he also served in the marines for six years between 1988 and '94. he also worked in asia as the bureau chief of the moscow

bureau of "the new york times". he was with the bureau for four years and bureau chief for one year. most of you, even if you're not a gun enthusiast or knowledgeable about guns, will be familiar with the ak-47 just because it is so widely available and so widely used. you saw an ak-47 in osama bin laden's videos, you see it in newsreels, everyone from literally child soldiers to drug dealers to terrorists. it's commonly seen. so we have a lot to cover today, so chris chivers who he has a boston area code on his phone number, he lives in providence, he just got back from afghanistan, and we're glad to have him here in austin. so, chris, how did this project get started with the ak-47? >> well, sometimes you come

across your subject almost by accident. in 2001 when we were working as reporters new to afghanistan after the attacks in new york and washington, i was traveling through the countryside and seeing the weapon everywhere. that's, obviously, intriguing, but not really a new observation. as the taliban was sort of pulling back and as the northern alliance, the forces that were allied with the united states were moving through the territory they occupied, we came a number of times to various houses and bunkers and fighting positions where they'd left behind their documents. and i started to gather those documents up and fill my backpack with them. and they were in many different languages, they were from many different years -- can you hear me now? and they had one thing in common. i started looking at the curriculum that the new students of the jihad, if you can call them that, what were they receiving for their instruction when they went to their classes, when they joined and went to a

training camp? it didn't matter where the camp was, what language the training was in, it didn't matter which year the notebooks were often dated. they were first class was the automatic kalashnikov. as i started to observe this, i said, now, that seems to me to be a long ways from where this weapon originated, made in an officially godless system, made in a planned economy in the eastern bloc. how did it break so far away from its roots in and so with that question in mind about nine years ago, i set to work. and what i found was that the kalashnikov which is familiar to all of us as being very reliable and very easy to use, very simple to clean and very long lasting, i mean, this is part of the allure of this weapon. that's not the reason it's out there. that's not the reason that there's so many of them and that you see it every day. the reason you see it every day is that it was linked up to a planned economy.

it was made by the tens of millions whether anyone paid for these rifles or not, whether the workers were paid or not, you know, there was no tax bill, there was no electric bill. this was made by a system that could do things different than pretty much any product out there. there's nothing, i think, that you own that is made this way. no factory in the united states is going to churn out a product without orders. so as i established that sort of understanding, i started to ask myself technically where did the weapon come from, you know, and hoped it was connect today a very different political system from what we understand, but how did they choose it? so i started my clock backwards back to the civil war where the first place that rapid-firearms were used in battle. i should say reasonably effective rapid firearms. and i followed them forward. those weapons as a system weighed, more or less, a ton. they were big, they were heavy, they needed a lot of ammunition, they looked, in fact, were often

times considered to be artillery. and the evolution of this weapon was that it arrived in the sort of final stage of effective miniaturization. how you went from a 2,000-pound item that would concentrate rifle fire to something that would be down about under 10 pounds, maybe even close to 8 fully loaded and that you could hide it under the jacket that i'm wearing if you took off the stock or you had a folding stock. then you hook this thing up to a planned economy so there's tens of millions of them. then the goths that planned that economy turn out to be in the main largely brittle. they fall apart and lose custody of the guns, and that's how you're in the situation that i saw when i got to afghanistan in 2001. and that's, charles, how i got started. >> now, the number, i believe you're estimating something like 900 million -- 100 million ak-47s of various vintages are in circulation today? compare that to the number just in terms of establishing the market economy comparison to the

m-16, those related weapons. >> one thing i did was i wanted to talk to people who were involved in the production. so i've been to some of the factories where they made the kalashnikovs, and no one will give you the numbers. i don't think they know the numbers, how many were made. but i also went to the united states' factories, the principle manufacturer of the weapon that has been used to counter the ak-47 is colt defense, and they make the m-16 and the m-4 carbine. they made about -- we're about a half century into this m-16 line, and they've made by their estimates worldwide about ten million. the kalashnikov was made in numbers -- by the estimates -- that are about ten times that. and that, again, is the reason that they're so, you know, they're so commonly seen. it's a matter of abundance. >> now, let's talk a little bit about your personal experience. i know you did an interview earlier this week in which you

talked about actually being ambushed by people carrying these ak-47s, and that led you to discuss some aspects of the effectiveness which are not really directly related to the specific functionality of the weapon which, again, talks about strategy and some of those questions. >> there's a lot of measures for how a rifle works, and a lot of those measures have nothing to do with how it works on a rifle range or at a test range. and can in afghanistan -- in afghanistan on all too many days we'd.com under fire for -- come under fire from kalashnikovs. a big part of my job is covering the war in afghanistan, so i'm not spending much time with the generals. i find that i'm out with the p troops and often out in some of the worst parts of the country. so if you wander around these parts of the country with the troops doing what they're doing, you tend to get ambushed now and then. and the kalashnikov in afghanistan is not an ideal

weapon. it's ideal, perhaps, in terms of its durability. it lasts a long time. it's easy to use if you're not very well trained, but it's not very accurate. so a lot of times the experience of being am burked is to have the -- ambushed is to have the rounds going by and no one in your group is struck. does that mean it's not effective? in i mean, one measure is whether or not you get struck. it certainly influences your behavior if there's large portions of a country that are armed up with automatic kalashnikovs and people have local grievances. these parts of the country in many respects are off the grid because of the abundance of the rifles. you can't bring in services, you can't bring in government, and you can't do much patrolling beyond the experience of getting ambushed. and there's other ways to measure it. one thing that, you know, they say the key nature of an insurgency is that insurgents learn, you know, over time they get better at what they're doing. if their training is is such that perhaps they can't shoot

you and hit you, at least not with any consistency, they can still use the rifle to influence your actions. and by that i mean you can be walking along a patrol, and the marines and the army have a variety of drills they do when they take fire from the right, they take fire from the left, from the front, near, far. these are in things that are in some cases counterintuitive and with a snap of the fingers as the first rounds go by, a patrol will break to the right, break to the left, and they run through the ambush sight. it may set up a firing position. so you'll often see in afghanistan a unit will go out on patrol, and one with a kalashnikov will take a few shots at it and watch that drill on the exact ground where that drill is happening. and a few marines may run to that wall, and a few may get behind that dike. and then the firing stops. and a few minutes later the marines get up and move on. two or three weeks later a patrol may walk through that same ground, the drill's repeated. two cracks, bursts of automatic

rifle fire will fly by, and the marines will jump into this drill, only this time when they run to that dike or that watering hole or that wall, one of those spots will be booby trapped, and there'll be an explosive there. so the kalashnikov is is still pretty influential. it might not make the list as what they call the wounding agent in that incident, but it certainly was a factor. >> now, when you talk about -- step back in history, it's interesting to note that some of the early gatling, for example, as the inventer of the gatling gun actually thought he was inventing something that would limit war fair, that would -- warfare, that would actually limit the number of soldiers. i believe he observed that the number of soldiers coming back from the civil war, the majority were dying from infection or not direct bullet wounds, so he thought if he could generate

this weapon that could, i think the phrase was let one soldier do the work of 100, that he would actually limit. so theoretically, again, it was sort of a, his intentions were to limit fare. warfare. that, obviously, didn't play out in any way. over either at that time or in the time since. >> gatling's a fascinating character. we don't know what he thought, we know what he said. >> right. >> yeah. and what he said, and it may have been sales was that, you know, boiled down more efficient slaughter will save of lives if, you know, we have a weapon that one man can do the killing of 100, maybe the other 99 don't immediate to go to battle and would thereby be saved for the country. didn't play out that way, did it? gatling was followed by maxim, and maxim took the gatling gun, you needed to crank the gatling

gun, it was not an automatic weapon as you understand it. it was a manually-fired rapid-fire weapon, and the maxim gun used the excess energy from one expended round to, if you would, reload the next round and fire it, and so the maxim gun would continue to fire without a crank just by depressing the firing mechanism until it rant out of -- ran out of ammunition or until you released that firing mechanism, the trigger, if you will. maxim didn't frame it this way at all. maxim thought that, you know, killing in the service of the crown was an effective way for the crown to, you know, execute its power over its subjects. maxim was pretty clear on that. at one point even they asked maxim to design a weapon that could be used against ammunition cards, and he wasn't interested. he said, you know, why would i want to make a weapon to shoot ammunition cards? i'm making a weapon to shoot men. and i think that, you know, when

we look back at gatling, it'd be really interesting if we could get to him and interview him and find out what he really thought as opposed to what his sales message was. >> i guess there's not so much a clear progression from there to -- if you compare that period of time to stalin's competition to create the ideal or this new weapon, new generation of weapon , the motivation then was similar but really a much, i guess articulated in much different ways. >> by the time the kalashnikov was made, we'd gone a long way from maxim. automatic weapons had been shrunk down to, you know, under 20 pounds, but they still couldn't be used by any one of you. they were still too heavy, the ammunition was too large, we were unwieldy, they generated a lot of heat, they tended to

break. two or three guys needed to use them, thus they were called crew-served weapons. what the germans figured out late in the '30s and in world wd war ii was if you took a pistol bullet and you took a rifle bullet, you know, the pistol cartridge would be about this big and the rifle cartridge would be about that big, and you made something in between them, you could have an intermediate-faired cartridge. if you built a rifle around it, it would be manageable by one person. the germans came up with this idea and gave it its first form. and these weapons were rushed out into the eastern front midway through world war ii roughly. and the russians got their hands on them. and the russians have been pretty good during the soviet phase at looking at the enemy's items and adopting things they liked about them. they didn't really have, as we have in the west, a sense of intellectual property or respect for patents.

and as a society that had been agrarian and was sort of industrializing at a rapid clip, they were more than willing to look at what, you know, arguably more technologically-sophisticated societies were making and to cop it. and the -- copy it. and the kalashnikov became a copy of this german idea. it's not item for item, it's not price as -- piracy as you might assign that word to it, but the core idea was german, and under stalin they decided to put it to their own soviet form. and they did this in a really unusual way. imagine if i broke this room into teams, a group of ten there, a group of ten there, etc., and can i gave you all a deadline and said i want you to come back to me at this deadline with the design specifications for a rifle that will do the following number of things, it will be easy to fire automatically, it can be fired semiautomatically which means one shot for each trigger pull with reloading for the next shot

happening within the apparatus. it'll have, fall within certain weight and length parameters. and then you guys came back to me a few months later, each team, with a different weapon or a different design for a weapon on paper. and then i would select from this group those that i thought as the judge, as your evaluator that were most likely to be effective, and i'd tell you to go back through another cycle of r&d. and at this point you would start to play mr. potato head, you might select design features from each rifle that looked promising. and from all the designs of previous weapons that were in your collection and gradually, you would put together a weapon, different components from different prototypes and from different pre-existing rifles. and this would come together over the course of 18 months and several cycles in a product that we would then take to the range and test. and this is how the kalashnikov came into being, exactly through

this process. and by early in 1948 they had their winner, and it was this weapon that was designed in 1947, thus the name ak, automatic kalashnikov, 1947. >> and it has continued to evolve over the years, but essentially as you pointed out, those early models still work more or less. i mean -- >> the kalashnikovs, think of it as a rifle, or you can think of it as an idea, a platform for the refinement. and as the weapon was pushed out into the world via the planned economy and via some provisions in the warsaw pact which brought factories to other socialist countries, each of them reworked it. the core design stayed the same, but it changed. i like to say it sort of changed the way -- i'll sort of date myself here -- the difference between a chevy nova and the buick skylark, right?

same car but not quite. something similar happened, and the whole environment of rifles out there however tens of millions there are, we call all of them ak-47s, but only a few of them are. now, about those original few made in a factory in central russia, i routinely find pretty much on every trip to afghanistan and i've been going back and forth for years, original automatic kalashnikovs from the early 1950s. often they're dented and they're will ate l banged up and, you know -- little banged up, they tend to look silver you rather than the black, and they're still working. we actually don't know yet how long a kalashnikov will last. don't have any idea. and that's an interesting point to me because i could ask all of you what do you have that you used in the last week that that's old? what do you have that's 50 years old? what do you have that's 20 years old? your laptop? your cell phone? the car you came in the on or

the bus? your microwave oven? your home phone? your toilet? do you have anything? that's not a fair question. some of these products didn't exist 50 years ago, right? so let's widen it up. what do you have now that you think you'll still use in ten years. do you have anything? anything more sophisticated than a garden tool or a baseball bat? i'll give you a few examples. i mean, maybe a musical instrument. a reader referred me to that. he said musical instruments and rifles are two things that actually lost a long, long time, and they stay very effective, you know, for a century or more. so there's a good one. others have said electric light. i'll give you that, but i'll take it back because most electrical lamps that are antiques have been rewired if you're using them today, so maybe they takes a asterisk. this is pretty incredible, charles, something that is that old and still out there and made in these quantities is why we'll

be talking about this rifle long after i'm dead. >> you can estimate easily that it may be another 20, 40, 50 years, no telling really how long -- >> yeah, there's no telling, and i would say it's probably longer than that. >> yeah. >> because what happened was these rifles are out there now, and they're very difficult to get back. they move like narcotics, but they're not like narcotics because they're not consumable. the only thing that takes them away is they get broken one by one. that takes some time. they get backed over by cars, they get lost, they get stuck into the ground by people who are hiding them and don't retrieve them because they're dead or out of the guerrilla game. otherwise, in the main those original accomplish any to have covers -- kalashnikovs are still out there. >> there's a lot more we could still talk about it. are there any questions right now that we want to entertain or discuss? this yeah -- yeah. >> [inaudible] >> oh.

we had a, we had an incident in which a young man had an ak-47 and took it into a campus and ended up not killing anyone but himself, but took the -- i think the only thing about that is that does address the availability and the, how widespread they are. there are issues around -- and i'm not sure if -- >> i'm glad to take it. >> okay, go ahead. >> yeah, sure. when that happened, i was in afghanistan, so i'm not going to sit here and pretend to really know the facts. can i talk generally about kalashnikov use in the united states? it's a very interesting theme. ak means automatic kalashnikov. in the united states, there are very few automatic kalashnikovs. almost none. not none, but automatic kalashnikovs are in the popular imagination something very close to machine guns.

they fire like a machine gun on automatic. in the united states, weapons that fit that description have been banned from public ownership since the 190s. -- 1930s. the thompson gun broke out, and in the 1930s the law was passed by congress, the national firearms act, which restricted the ownership of fully-automatic weapons. what we have in the united states are kalashnikov-like objects. they look exactly the same, but they fire semiautomatically. they don't fire automatically. we have a big national discussion about gun control and the kalashnikov often plays a prominent role in it. but it's really not the same item that i'm writing about. the weapon that's overseas, the weapon that i just talked about that was made in these big quantities that was a military assault rifle that then the governments that had it lost custody of, that item has a switch on it. and the switch as you press it down goes from safe to automatic to semi-automatic. the rifles that are sold in the united states which get called ak47s routinely in

conversation, aren't ak-47s. they don't have that automatic feature. and i'll tell you something, people will quarrel with me on this. i don't want to be shot, okay, let's be clear on that, but if i had to choose, ak-47 would be high on my list. it fires a round almost always it's fully encased in a metal jacket which was designed under some of the conventions to limit wounding to combatants, conventional army and conventional army. would be much better to be shot by that than to be shot by some of the ammunitions used to fire at game animals in this country, the soft-point rounds. so the conversation, i'm not taking a pass at it, but i'm saying i don't really know the facts if that was really an automatic kalashnikov or rifle that just looks like it, and it really hasn't been my subject because i've been looking more at the effects of where these weapons in the automatic form, you know, circulate in very large quantities. >> do you want to follow up on that, or is that -- >> [inaudible]

>> no, go ahead. >> you seem to be very interested and to make this subject in unintended result in the controlled economy producing and manufacturing these guns, and i wanted to know if you had anything more general to say about -- [inaudible] >> well, the whole -- >> the idea of unintended consequences of this process, development, distribution? >> yeah. we tend as outlined at the beginning of the talk to see the kalashnikov as this kind of object -- [inaudible] if there's a more significant dimension to it in terms of -- [inaudible] >> the whole story of automatic weaponry, we start with gatling who said this will save lives, the whole thing if you read it on the surface, it's all about unintended consequences from beginning to right now. you know, i don't think i'm talking about those rifles, you

know, i often will find these old kalashnikovs, the original ak-47 items in the hands of afghans, and often times they're afghans who are in the american employ. i don't think nikita kruschev really handed these things out more than stalin did. stalin died fairly early in the kalashnikov cycle. i don't think that he ever foresaw that they'd be carried by an american-sponsored military, you know, bought cheap and issued. this is unintended consequences, right? and i don't think when we issued them in pakistan back in the '80s to flow into afghanistan that we would ever see osama bin laden using them as propaganda devices in the videos after 9/11. i mean, the whole story's unintended consequences, so i agree with you. >> the only time i've seen one was at -- [inaudible] >> yeah. and can then the finns made a

kalashnikov, too, so both sides of the border have them. >> yeah, okay. >> [inaudible] >> who was kalashnikov? >> who is kalashnikov, he's still alive. >> he's still alive? >> kalashnikov is a russian cosack, he was born out in the step near kaszikstan. what's he doing out there, right? this doesn't make sense. under the czar, families had been relocated to populate the step, and his father had taken one of these incentives and moved out there and had what you would call in american terms a homestead out there. he was born right at about the time, you know, the revolution was gathering its real domestic momentum, and in the 1930s his family suffered from collectivization. their homestead was taken away, they were moved into the wilderness northward into

siberia, and he lived as an exile. essentially a family of nonpeople. he fled that to kaszikstan and was sort of living as a clerk at a rail yard when world war ii broke out. his father had died from being in exile, his family, his brother had been arrested and family was ruined, essentially, by the experience, you know, of stalinist, the stalinist policies. and world war ii, they call it the great patriotic war in russia, reorganized his experience with his government. he joined the army and became a tank mechanic and was out in the eastern districts, i'm sorry, the western districts in eastern europe when world war ii broke out, when hitler invaded into ukraine and into russia and into the soviet union. he was moved to the front and participated in a tank battle in which claims he was wounded

after he was wounded, he began to design weapons, and he became part of a very large constellation of soviet arms design centers. the soviet union couldn't make, never did make a very good toilet or escalator or elevator. you wouldn't want to wear a soviet pacemaker. but they invested intensely in arms design, and in related military equipment. they make an excellent helicopter, till do. very good main battle tank, very good rifles. they do what they wanted them to do. he became part of this constellation of designers, and from there he described the contest a few moments ago, he was a participant in this contest to make this rifle off of the, you know, basically reusing the german ideas and giving them soviet form. he was credited with the design of this rifle. if you look closely at the available russian records, it was clearly a collective process. it was not like, you know, edison and his lightbulb.

it wasn't you down in your basement, it wasn't like, you know, a software entrepreneur at home. he was part of a very, very big team, and he was part of a government machine that was making a lot of the decisions for him. and he was credited with designing the rifle, and he's still alive. he's lived -- this rifle's design gave him a lot of material and social security. didn't make him rich, he's not bill gates. i don't want to overstate it, but compared to most russians, he's done quite well. and he's celebrated to this moment as a national hero, sort of a great example of the russian mind. >> [inaudible] >> [inaudible] as one of the unintended consequences of that been that wars are much easier to start and keep going longer and more -- [inaudible] because of that? and seen as -- seeing as there

are now 100 billion annual increase in -- [inaudible] worldwide because it's not like -- [inaudible] >> right. so the question is, how has that proliferation or the abundance of kalashnikovs affected warfare, and what is the current production then, do you know? >> i'll be clear, you know, if we gathered up all the kalashnikovs today and put them in a pile and melted them and turned them into paperweights, there'd still be war tomorrow. you know, the kalashnikovs didn't create war, and there'll be war after they're gone, however long that takes. if it takes 50 years or 100, people will still be fighting. but does the kalashnikov make war take a different form? i would say it certainly does. maybe not conventional army and conventional army. a lot of wars aren't fought that way. but it gives form to all sorts of local anger and guerrilla groups that otherwise would not be able to, perhaps, go toe to

toe in combat with government forces or with whoever they're fighting. it makes human right abuses possible on a grander scale than otherwise would occur. it's very significant in crime. not so much in this country for the reasons we describe because we don't really have them here. so it's very influential in all of these ways. you know, in vietnam it was probably the first war in which a local force a local force that wasn't especially sophisticated, wasn't very well trained, it was not backed by a powerful economy was able to go, you know, fire fight by fire fight into battle against what was arguably the most sophisticated western force on the planet and push them back for years. i mean, this was a battlefield leveler. this did not really happen before, you know? the experience had been that expeditionary detachments from, you know, large western nations were able to go and exert their

influence over colonial lands with just a small number of, small number of soldiers but a lot of firepower. and the local people didn't have either the weapons or the ammunition or the means to get them. and the weapons were big, bulky, they were hard to move around, they weren't intuitive in their use, so the local people didn't have them. the kalashnikov changed that, and it changed that in a lot of places. there is the lord' resistance army which is now about 25 years old in northeastern uganda. it was the descendant of a previous group that did not have rifles in the any great -- in any great numbers. that group did not last very long. the ugandan defense forces basically routed them. very quickly. the follow-on group made a point of gathering kalashnikovs, and a quarter century later they're still in the field. so i think it's very influential. how many are there, that was your second question?

this. >> yeah, how many are -- >> how many are coming out? well, the great puzzle of the kalashnikov collection is they're usually made by countries that aren't transparent. they've got a decent run of numbers for germany. as the country fell apart and the records existed, but many other countries we don't know. production's clearly less now than it was, but there's a new factory coming online in venezuela, the chinese continue to make them, the russian plants aren't open every day. i sometimes feel like they switch the light on in the plants and bring the workers in for the journalists when they have an order and otherwise the praise is pretty idled. -- place is pretty idled. i can't give you a number. nobody can. it's not clear to me that the people involved in the production over the years -- and i've tried to interview a bunch of them -- that they even know how many they made. information was compartmentalized. >> let me get in there. >> in a broadcast interview this

week about the m-16 and how -- [inaudible] used in vietnam. [inaudible] and in particular how does the, how do the weapons of -- [inaudible] match -- [inaudible] >> so the question is, how the u.s.-made weapon, the m-16, compares both in terms of historically and in a contemporary sense in the afghan war? >> well, and have we learned the lesson of the vietnam experience? >> yeah. >> [inaudible] >> i hope i don't talk too long. i like this question. the early m-16 was a disaster. a lot of it was in the way it was manufactured. there's a difference. it did not have an adequate

protective coating, and it did not have a chromed chamber and barrel. and if you take a weapon like that into the jungle and you don't issue much cleaning gear with it, which they didn't, you don't train people in this it or very -- for very long, which they didn't, you're going to have problems which they did. it took them too long, it cost too many lives, frustrated too many soldiers, but they made a lot of changes to the rifle, and by i would say the late '60s or early '70s it was already becoming a significantly different rifle. when i was in the marines, it was utterly different. it was a second generation product. i carried it for years when it was using live ammunition. there's a big difference between live and blanks. i never had one jam when using live ammunition. we shot a lot. never had one jam.

but i had a curious experience. i was assigned at up with point to attend -- one point to attend the army's ranger school. one year i was lucky enough to be one of them, and there is at the end -- or there was -- the live fire training period lasted, i can't remember, 10, 12, 14 days out in many -- out in utah. i could not make the thing work. i didn't have a single day that i used that when i could get through a single magazine without it double feeding. i couldn't make it work. it was a different weapon. completely different weapon. so let's now take it forward because i'm a generation past. today they have a different m-16 again, and they have the m-4 carbine which is a shortened version. i find that there are a lot of complaints. if you read the internet about it f be you go out in the -- if you go out in the field, i've never seen one jam in a fire

fight. i've never heard complaints about reliability, about whether the weapon works. there are a lot of complaints about whether it's the right weapon. they're not really reliability-based complaints anymore. every war's different, and vietnam was maybe the perfect war for the kalashnikov and the worst war for the early m-16. why? wet environment, short ranges because of dense vegetation. it didn't work. it was a complete mismatch, you know? it's ali and frazier, complete mismatch. but afghanistan is is a different war. it's a very air rid environment, the ranges tend to stretch out. the people fighting the americans know that the americans have -- not just the americans, but the nato forces have very good optics, very good communications, very good weapons, and they tend to shoot at them from pretty good distances. they don't like to get in close because experience has taught them the guys who get in close

often get dead. so they tend to hang back. so a lot of the american soldiers now are in fights at pretty distant ranges, and the rounds that are used by the m-16 might not travel that far with enough munch in the -- punch in the eyes of the people shooting them. so there's a significant conversation that's been going on for about ten years about whether they should have a different cartridge. if you have a different cartridge, that means off different rifle. that -- that means you have a different rifle. that's the main complaint now, whether the weapon is ideally suited for the conditions in which it's being used. but the complaints aren't anything like in vietnam. i think when people take this weapon out each day, they don't wonder whether it's going to work. >> is that it? >> [inaudible] in light of your comments, the conversation that's been going on for two years about whether the weapon's well suited, how do we deal with that in policy? >> [inaudible] >> how do you deal with the

policy if we've been talking about it for ten years. you know, there's a great -- david boyd george had a problem with lord -- [inaudible] in world war i where the germans had machine guns by the tens of thousands, and the british had about 1200, and the british were being slaughtered in the trenches. he was the minister of munitions before he became the premier, and he wanted to ask kitchener, why aren't we making more weapons? why aren't you ordering more machine guns? why are we suffering this horrible institutional imbalance, and, you know, we're losing a generation of our young men to it. and kitchener wasn't really interested in machine guns. even though he'd used them on colonial expedition in africa and seen what they could do. and lloyd george in his memoirs later wrote to whom this seems a strange tale has no idea of the

fanatical hostility of our senior military leaders to any new ideas. that's part of it. i don't want to overstate it. it's richer than that. nowadays the united states isn't really in a position to choose it own cartridge. under the rules of nato. it's supposed to be a consensus if you're going to make a switch. one thing they learned in world war ii when every night or most -- nation or most nations had a different cartridge for rifles which were all moment to do the same thing, supply became really, really complicated. now we have one cartridge for machine guns and one for rifles and everybody used that same -- uses that same standard so everybody uses the same ammunition. you can supply troops in the field. we can't make the switch without upsetting our relations with nato. we went through this cycle as a country in the 1950s as well when we came out of world war ii and some of our allies wanted a medium cartridge, something like

what the russians were going to use and what the germans had used and the pentagon nixed it, and we got stuck with bigger rifles than what the troops needed for vietnam. so it's very complicated how this isn't just a case of one guy reacting to it. but i would tell you a lot of the troops are very us from rated -- frustrated in my opinion. they'd like it to be quicker, and there's not a lot of nimble thinking out there on such big ballistics questions. >> another question. >> yeah. i wanted to comment on the economics of the ak-47. i mean, the m-16 in africa and the rebel insurgent group doesn't have a cell phone, but clearly, they've got their hands on an ak-47. in the third world, by and large, it seems to be eminently affordable. how does all that work? >> so the question is about the economics, the economics based on the availability and do they

become like a means of -- >> the common thing you'll hear is that kalashnikov are so cheap, they're almost free. it's nonsense. they don't cost the same as a sack of weed. they don't cost the same as a chicken. and, you know, no less than the secretary general of the united nations has made these kinds of comparisons. they typically cost -- i've tracked the prices and others have too -- in this a conflict zone 5, 6, 7, 8, $900. that's in a conflict zone. that's where tensions are high and people think they need to be armed up. when a conflict cools down, the price falls. when people are feeling more secure, they're less likely to stockpile their arms or seek them in markets. and when the prices fall, they get bought up and moved to other conflicts. if you can pick up an item for $200 and move it, it's a little item, like i said, 8, 9 pounds, you can sell it for 5 or $600, it's well worth your trouble especially if you can get a bunch of them.

that's still pretty cheap. the united states is the largest-known recircumstancelator of kalashnikovs right now, so we've got price information on them at the wholesale side. the united states buys them from eastern european arsenals and reissues them in iraq and afghanistan. and we know that the initial purchases of these weapons, we don't know all the prices, but we can see the bids, and we can see the contracts. and we know that, you know, an air-delivered kalashnikov in pulg say from -- bulk say from central europe to, you know, to kabul to the airport -- the united states government bought lots of several thousand will cost roughly $200 apiece or a little bit less. i've talked to some guys who do the purchasing, and they've bought up big stocks at 95, $100 a rifle. that's what they cost wholesale.

but retailer they're much more expensive than that. and they'll last a long, long time out there. and so, you know, if you think about how much money that is and you can use it for a decade or two or more and you can resell it when you're done with it, while that's not $25, it's not a chicken, it's still pretty cheap. >> yes. >> do you ever talk to a good industrial engineer and do a product analysis of how much it would cost to manufacture one in the united states and how much the m-16 cost and how much plant costs are for each plant to produce those weapons? >> i don't know what colt spends on making their m-16. they're a privately-held company, they don't have to share that with you. i know what they sell them for. they sell them to the u.s. government with a rail system on it, a rail system being things that will hold lights and optics

and hand grips and stuff like that that make the rifle more tricked-out f the you will, for western -- more sophisticated western uses. a lot of people, by the way, don't like any of that stuff. they think it weights the weapon down. anyhow, that weapon costs about $1100 to the u.s. government. >> what? >> about $1100 to the u.s. government in a bulk purchase. how much it costs to make them, i don't know. and i wouldn't expect colt to tell me. >> it's easy enough to get an industrial engineer to look at it and do an analysis. there aren't any secrets out there. it's all in the manufacturing process. >> and then you add in, you know, tax bills and local cost of utilities and how you negotiate your labor because it's, you know, labor cost is different in the northeast than it does o down in the south. but i don't know what the answer is is to what one would cost -- >> one question was was there ever a discussion about actually copying at the time the ak-47

fist came out -- first came out, was there at any level a discussion of literally copying it? that's something you kind of deal with. >> the united states hasn't been interested in the kalashnikov system. they initially regarded it as a tool that was good enough for sort of a crude soviet conscript and beneath sort of the far-shooting american grunt. they had no interest in it. they sneered at it. later when it was issued in vietnam against american forces, they desperately wanted something to counter it. and that's how we got into the m-16. but there never was a discussion about actually fielding kalashnikovs for large-scale american use. there are some american soldiers who use them and train on them, but it's not a general issue weapon, and it never, i think, will be. we have made in this country some kalashnikov ammunition but not in great big quantities. there hasn't really been a lot -- >> so what you're describing

kind of is sort of an academic exercise of what would it cost for it to be copied? >>st to it's not an academic exercise at all, it's the engineering question that anybody with any sort of manufacturing background would just jump on right away and get an answer to. >> here's a problem with w if you were to want to be a kalashnikov manufacturer today, you face a glutted market. >> right. >> very, very hard to sell your product. today's costs of labor and utilities and commodities and, you know, transporting the rifle around and your sales force costs, those add up fast. and if you can buy the kalashnikovs fully functional out of eastern europeans wholesale for $95 apiece, you're not going to be able to compete with that. these older weapons were made in situations where they didn't really have to pay for the costs of the construction because it was so heavily subsidized. so it's very difficult. even the soviet union, excuse

me, even latter-day russia in their kalashnikov plants haven't been able to produce and sell their weapons because there are so many out there, there aren't customers to buy them at the current costs that the factory would be able to make them at and for the factory to make a profit. russia will -- if you go to russia and say i'd like to buy a big batch of kalashnikovs, they're more likely to sell you the older stock. it's cheaper. >> the firearms industry, nobody makes any money until there's war because then they get rich, and everybody goes broke. >> in the kalashnikov, you have a special case in that there's so many out there that you're competing against a full market. >> right. >> and today's costs of production being what they are, it's pretty hard to beat the price that you can get in the field. >> the back here. >> could you talk about the ak as an instrument of prophesy war? >> an instrument of -- >> proxy war? >> proxy war. >> the kalashnikov as an instrument of proxy war? well, if your proxy is not

especially sophisticated and you don't have a lot of time to train your proxy, then the kalashnikov's the weapon you'd probably be handing out because it's cheap and the training costs are pretty crow, and it's why it's so widely used in exactly that role. >> could i follow it up? what are we using to train the afghan soldier? what weapon are we providing them? and i know you -- [inaudible] california some arms trade -- [inaudible] how much built in just arms trading in general. >> what do we use -- the first part first, what is the united states using to train the afghans, and the answer is it's a jumbled mishmash. initially they handed out kalashnikovs to the army and the police, different kalashnikovs to both. then they decided they wanted to bring the army under nato-standard weapons, so they've been as new afghan battalions are being made, and they're being made at the rate

of sometimes two or three a month right now, they're going into the field with m-16s and a whole host of weapons associated with it, the grenade launcher, the squad automatic weapon and others. the police still carry the kalashnikov. this is creating a lot of confusion out there, in my view, in this how you supply them because the police and the army have different ammunition needs, and they're not -- and the ammunition and the magazines used are incompatible with each other if they're ever in a fire fight together. there is talk about bringing the police on to nato-standard weapons as well, but i'm not sure there's money for it now, and they're doing it, they're doing the army first. so it's going to take a little while before they can even come to a decision point about whether they want to do the police. this is kind of a confused system because the training for the two weapons is different, the ammunition is different, and then you have the situation where you have incompatibilities

in the field. but why would they want to do it? the one is, i think, they probably wouldn't say this, that there's money in this game. and the other is that the afghans have kalashnikovs, the afghan government forces when they have accomplish any coughs have the same weapons and ammunition of the taliban, and a lot of that ammunition is leaking from the government to the taliban and coming back at western forces and afghan forces. and so if you switch to m-16s and you use different ammunition, you might not be supplying the insurgency in the short and medium term anyhow with equipment that they can use to kill your forces. and so all of these things -- it becomes a puzzle how you do it, and then you decide if you want to do it, how much is it worth? because it costs a lot of money, and it takes a lot of time. >> do you have a question? this anybody else? here we go. >> [inaudible]

>> you know, the question was about i've been writing in "the new york times" about bolt-action rifles. i tend to inventory taliban equipment when i can get my hands on it in if afghanistan to figure out what they're using and why. no, it's not going to be another book. but it's useful to understanding this subject, why? because some of these will be in-field rifles that are being used by the afghan forces are approaching a century in age. they're still out there, they're still working. i mean, rifles when they're well made really last and last. they're hard to break. a well-made rifle. if you take care of it. and, you know, you see this sort of the refuse of the old expedition into afghanistan and the old empires still being used very effectively against western troops a century after these weapons were first made. you know, i found one rifle this year that, you know, was made for kitchener's new army to go, you know, under the western front.

and it was being used against, you know, american marines in helmand province in afghanistan a century later, and, you know, again we don't know how long these rifles will last. you know? they haven't come to the end of their lives yet, and they probably won't be at the end of their lives long after i'm gone. >> we're kind of down to the -- we've got maybe one or two more. just a reminder that chris will be in the book-signing tent to sign books in about ten or fifteen minutes. one more question. okay. >> [inaudible] currently, at least from the civilian side -- [inaudible] developments like -- [inaudible] i don't know if that's trickled it way into military -- [inaudible] but if it is, is that influenced by the kalashnikov design in

your opinion? >> it's influence -- you know, the question was the m-16's being reworked in the civilian market. there's a bunch of different systems you can use to make an automatic weapon work. without getting into the details, there's different ways to do it, and you've got to make choices. colt's manufacturing some prototype rifles that have a different system than the pre-existing one. and will that find its way into american military use. you know, i don't know. the american military is looking closely at some replacements for its current line of main rifles, its general issue arms. the army's doing it, the marines are doing something separately looking at different automatic weapons that they might issue in the future. there are different camps out there. you know, talking about rifles is to enter a real thicket of conflicting opinions and really sometimes, you know, really sort of heated arguments that can

even turn mean spirited. everybody's got a different rifle that they want to push, and every rifle's got a camp. and the american military because, you know, they can make anyone rich very quickly if they decide to incorporate their design into the general issue is endlessly approached by sales people who have a new and better thing. and they're sorting through this constantly, and they have been for 100 years or more. so i wouldn't say that any one system is necessarily going to find its way into use. i think that the conversation that they're having now is a lot like the conversation in the past, and at some point they'll make a replacement, but it's very hard to predict when or with what. >> okay. the book is "the gun." thanks to chris chivers. [applause]

>> this talk was part of the 2010 texas book festival held annually in austin. for more on new york times' senior writer c.j. chivers and his work, visit c.j. chiers.com. >> harold varmus is the author of the art and politic of science.rmis welcome to the program and tell us, how did you come up with the title of that s book? >> well, i knew that a book that was simply given a scientific titleat would not be very attractive, and secondly as a scientist i know that science has artistic features and it'sas strongly linked to politics. my own life has been engaged not only in the science, but in the arts and in the politics of doing science. so what is interesting to most people about what i do is the way in which science is conducted and the way in which the political process influences science.n and those are topics that i've been end gauged in and thought the public -- engaged in andblic thought the public would enjoy

reading about. >> describe your transfer answem from an english -- transferences to scientist. >> i was originally spended to become -- intending to become a doctor. went to college, fell in love with literature. became disenchant with the that, went back to medical school and at the age of 28 was compelled by the vietnam war to provideth some government service which id did at the national institutes of health where i learned that research is even more exciting than medicine and then devoted my life to science after that. >> what will fans of science learn about politics from reading your book, and what will fans of politics learn about science? boo >> well, that's a good questions i think people who simply admire the scientific process will begin to realize how important, interesting and difficult the interface between science and the public that cares about itns and pays for it and congress that oversees it can be. those who are interested in

politics will see that political action does influence the scientific process.olit science at one time was dependent on the lahr jess of royalty and wealthy people. it still depends on wealthy people to a certain extent, but it depends much more heavily on the way that government supports and pays for science, and that'r a political process we have to encounter directly all the time whether it's stem cell researchr or thinking about how to improve the nation's health or simplyn's providing funds for scientists at the nih or the national science foundation or elsewhere to do their work. >> your book is laid out in the four parts; becoming a scientist, doing science, political science and continuing controversy. tell us, why did you lay your i book out that way? >> well, i thought the things people would care about, first of all, why are you a scientist? in fact, what i'm trying to point out in that section is that you don't have to think you're a scientist from therom third grade. c america is forgiving, it allows

a prolonged adolescence, and i think people need to understand you can become a scientist even in your late 20s as i did. then i wanted to devote -- the trickiest part of my book was how much to say about the science that i've done. it's complicated, and i didn'tdn want to insult the audience, buw i wanted to take a thread and follow it looking at one aspect of my career that was, frankly, important because it led to the award of a nobel prize and alsod a discovery of genes involve inside cancer, a disease people care about. so i wanted to trace both my own activities as a scientist and link that to a very important social problem, namely cancer.o andci then because in a sense there was a connology to this, that is i did most of myrono scientific work but not all of it before i became a government leader, i wanted to talk about what it was like to be the directer of the nih, to run a large agency in the government,